Deeplinks Blog posts about File Sharing

According to TorrentFreak, last summer's Star Trek movie was the "most pirated movie of 2009." So it seems that Paramount Pictures was prescient when it gave testimony before the FCC that used Star Trek as an illustrative example of how "Internet piracy" is poised to devastate Hollywood and (though the nexus here is less than clear) undermine residential broadband in America.

Funny thing is, Star Trek is on course to make more than $100 million in profits.

The Internet is global, and so are threats to digital freedom. Over the past year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has fought Internet censorship, oppressive copyright laws and privacy violations wherever they've been under threat around the world.

With the help of our global partners and supporters like you, EFF has been able to achieve great things over the past year:

Digital Video Recorders, once considered a mortal threat by the entertainment industry, have now become its new best friend. It's just the latest example of how the industry's constant warnings of the dangers of "piracy" frequently turn out to be baseless hysteria.

Remember 2001? Digital Video Recorders ("DVRs") like TiVo and ReplayTV were poised to win mainstream adoption, allowing consumers to fast-forward past advertisements more easily than before. In response, the entertainment industry behaved predictably — it freaked out and filed a bunch of lawsuits.

In DC, the summer doldrums have ended, and Congress has begun a flurry of activity. Legislators are in the midst of considering several important bills:

The Informed P2P User Act is the latest effort from Rep. Mary Bono Mack, who in 1998 gave us the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. The bill is ostensibly aimed at protecting users of peer-to-peer file-sharing software from accidentally sharing their private information. Unfortunately, it takes a paternalistic approach that assumes that more pop-up warnings and FTC enforcement actions will somehow stop users from misconfiguring their software. Public Knowledge has the details. The House is due to vote on it soon; let's hope they send it back to committee for refinement.

The UK government still seems unsure as to whether it's a good idea to punish those accused of illegal downloading by cutting off Internet access for entire households, saying it wants to "support" the music industry. But now it seems a coalition of the actual British musicians, songwriters and producers behind the music don't want "support" of this kind, and view this sort of draconian policy as "extraordinarily negative."

Thankfully, there are some people in the UK who think this sort of draconian policy is a terrible idea, and are taking a stand against it — namely, the British music community.